On the irrationality of some "experts" (Part 1)

VERSIÓN EN ESPAÑOL: Sobre la irracionalidad de algunos “expertos” (Parte 1)

📝 Why I Once Called Myself a “Dummy” — And Why It Worked

Two years ago, I wrote a blog post titled "Fluid dynamics for dummies, like me: on potential flows". The title had a double intention: on one hand, I was being honest. I am just beginning my journey into the vast universe of aerodynamics and fluid dynamics, starting with the simplest case — incompressible flow. On the other hand, I wanted to poke a bit at a certain type of expert who dismisses Potential Flow Theory (PFT) as outdated or irrelevant. Some people didn’t appreciate the joke.

Fig. 1 Potential flow solution for a parabolic parachute canopy (for added masses calculation; Pimentel, 2016). Note the clown face in the upper figure.

One well‑known “potentialist” on LinkedIn took the title as a personal attack. Instead of reading and understand the intention of the article, he blocked me and criticized my writing style. Ironically, that misunderstanding brought me more than 500 views in two days — five times my usual traffic. It became the most‑read post on my blog for over two years (see Fig. 2).

That episode taught me something important: sometimes a provocative title does more for scientific outreach than a perfectly polite one.

Fig. 2 Hystorical views on my personal blog. The first peak includes the more than 500 visualizations mentioned above.

Let me simplify this for readers who aren’t fluid‑dynamics specialists. Potential Flow Theory is a mathematical model that describes how fluids move when we assume that the flow sticks perfectly to surfaces, even though it is supposed to have no viscosity. Of course, real fluids don’t behave that way — honey, water, air, everything has viscosity. But here’s the twist: Even though PFT is a simplification, and even though it assumes conditions that never occur perfectly in nature, it still matches experimental results surprisingly well in many cases.

That’s why engineers have used it for decades to get quick, efficient estimates of aerodynamic behavior. It’s not a replacement for high‑fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD), but it’s a powerful tool when used correctly. Some people don't like hearing that.

🛑 The Real Story: When Scientific Debate Turns Irrational

This article isn’t about equations. It’s about what happens when scientific disagreement becomes personal — and irrational.

My doctoral research builds on a potential method developed in the 1990s by Prof. Don Durston (NASA Ames Research Center). His implementation was simple but clever: model additional detached wakes behind a thin flat plate to improve predictions. My contribution was to extend this idea to include all possible detached wakes, including the leading edge. The results were solid: four scientific papers and an international patent application (see Fig. 3).

Fig. 3 My four research papers and an international patent application (click on each to follow the link). Dedicated to each one of the five-level pyramid.

Yet my former advisors rejected the work outright. Their words were: “Illogical, unphysical, and theoretically unjustifiable”.

This contradicted the opinion of external experts like Prof. Joseph Katz (San Diego State and Johns Hopkins universities), who encouraged me to continue the research. It also contradicted the judgment of journal reviewers and patent examiners. So what was the real issue? Not the science. Not the methodology. But the fact that the evidence came from a “novice” [1].

What followed was a cascade of institutional failures — almost comical if they hadn’t affected my career.

Here’s the pyramid:

1. Ex‑advisors: Declined supervision, claiming the research was “unjustifiable”.

2. Academic commission: Refused to resolve the conflict and passed the problem upward.

3. PhD coordinator: Claimed to send the case to the Doctoral School.

4. Doctoral School: Never issued a real report. Instead, the coordinator sent an unsigned Word file saying I was expelled for not paying tuition fees!!! without any notification.

5. University rector (previous administration: 2021-2025): Used this invalid document to issue a final decision.

Because I was outside the country and lacked access to legal defense, the issue escalated from an administrative irregularity to a criminal matter. When I publicly exposed these anomalies during the rector’s re‑election campaign, things became even more complicated.

I’ve spent two years in this blog writing about aerodynamics, potential flows, and the beauty of simple models. But this time, I want to talk about something else: the irrationality that sometimes hides behind academic authority.

This isn’t just a technical debate. It’s about:

• how institutions react when challenged,

• how “experts” sometimes defend dogma instead of evidence,

• and how a young researcher can be punished for thinking differently.

If you want to know how this conflict affected the previous university administration — and how the current one and the justice system are responding — read the next part: On the irrationality (not irrotationality) of some "experts" (Part 2)

No step back, whatever the consequences.

The style of this text has been improved by IA (Gemini Flash) and further modified by GPT-5.1 for a less technical article.

[1] On innovation and other hoaxes: a true story at university (Part 1)